


May God So Keep Me

by the_blue_fairie



Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon), Tangled (2010)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24220423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_blue_fairie/pseuds/the_blue_fairie
Summary: Cassandra is not Joan of Arc, but she feels a kinship with her. As the company approaches the Dark Kingdom, Cass meditates on this sense of kinship, on her feelings for Rapunzel, and where her choices may lead her.
Relationships: Cassandra/Rapunzel (Disney: Tangled)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 37





	May God So Keep Me

**Author's Note:**

> I poured my heart into the writing of this and hope you will review. Thank you.

She is not Joan.

Joan spoke artfully – evaded her interrogators.

Joan spoke clearly.

Artful and clear are two different things.

Artful and clear are inconsistent.

Inconsistency shows the cracks.

The cracks of the flesh struck by the scourge.

The blood that ran like tears.

The cracks of the skin that blackened like her own hand into a talon.

Joan had screamed in the end.

And yet, for all her inconsistency – for all her cracks – she held a rightness in herself that defied her judges.

Skin mottles when it burns like the branches of a black tree.

Cassandra knows that pain.

Yet, she does not know the rightness – how Joan did it – how even with the cracks, the screams at the end (screams must be doubt, yes? or are they merely things that are, neutral, without significance, no one cares when you scream, or maybe they do care and you are too unfeeling, too absorbed in yourself to care about them – unfeeling? but you scream because you feel, you feel the pain too much, why don’t you just stop it, little girl? you’re hurting everyone you love, everyone whose hands reach out to yours…) she could be transfigured into art.

How the flames that ate her could be made elegant by the artist’s brush, how the fear could be made pure, the defiance made righteous. How Joan did everything right so that even death in ignominy proved her rightness.

(And what of that which did not prove her rightness? What of the inscriptions of her words – scratched on parchment with shame? What of Shakespeare – who painted a host of demons with her blood, with the blood that spilled from the cracks?)

Cassandra knows she is Joan la Pucelle – not Joan of Arc.

She is the cracks soliloquized from the soul, printed in folio.

(Scream when the fire eats you and some Englishman will shape your screams into a soliloquy of horror. Scream and he will use your screams to condemn you all over again, although you are already burning. Don’t scream. It hurts so badly, but don’t scream. Your skin boiling like jet-black tar, falling from your frame. It’s okay. You’ve felt the scorching of your hand before, this is like that. All this is, is like that – but that was horrible, no, don’t tell yourself that. Your hair tangling with flame, the closest you will ever get to the sun. Don’t scream to Rapunzel, she is burdened with too much already, she doesn’t need the weight of you on her already heavy heart. Don’t scream, the fire will peel your charred lips from your skull’s jaws in a moment, devour your tongue, it will all be over. You want to scream, you should have a right to scream here at least, of all places, on your pyre, but here least of all. Please don’t scream. Don’t scream don’t scream don’tscream dontscream DONTSCREAM)

Joan la Pucelle, indeed. Pride even on the pyre. Scream to Rapunzel. Confess yourself to her. Confess how you love her, you’ll have one soft look among the crowd. Wait, is that why you are screaming, for one tender pair of eyes among the onlookers as you burn? _That_ is pride. Don’t scream, then. Don’t be prideful. Don’t scream.

Joan had her voices to soothe her on her pyre.

Voices of light.

And yet, how much could they have soothed her as the smoke began to rise?

Cassandra flexes her armored talon.

When a Voice finally comes to her, it gives no comfort.

The smoke is thick. With any luck, it will choke you before the flames begin to feed.

But it does not choke her – and by the time Cassandra seizes the Moonstone, all she wants is the fire – for it to burn and purge her away.

But you’re a liar, aren’t you? Because there is legacy in ignominy and you want that even when you don’t, you just want to die, for it all to end, to stop the pain or to be given all the pain you deserve, the gates are yawning – _Eternal I endure_ – you scream your lungs out – so much for DONTSCREAM – and from that hollow place where your lungs once were spews forth a fount of blue, a pillar of fire – you burn from the inside not like a sinner at the gates of hell but like hell itself, spikes rearing from your limbs like in the deepest furnaces of the earth.

All the cracks burn blue.

As the power razes her skull, scalds her hair with blue flame, she almost thinks she glimpses hell – or the shadow of it that men have written of, that her father revealed to her in educating her from tomes in the library of Corona – **_they say the deepest circle is reserved for betrayers._**

She wants death, but not for the pain to end – not now. That was a little guilty dream she had before she became Betrayer. She longs for hell to take her, for this little life of pain she feels now to be eclipsed, for a universe of pain to render her a blind and stupefied thing forever – unceasing because she does not deserve its cease.

But pain unimaginable, pain eternal would be all too easy.

And really, what arrogance to put herself alongside the likes of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot.

Life-in-death begins.

She drops after the Moonstone’s power lifts her aloft, but not like a fallen angel. She only hits the earth.

Cassandra breathes raggedly.

She raises her eyes, sees Rapunzel’s anguished, heartbroken face before her, and realizes with bitterness that she is still in the world.


End file.
